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I can’t think of a lot to say here, but I feel the need to say something. I think a lot of people feel the same way, and that’s evident in most of the forums I’ve seen so far. What happened today (or yesterday in most of the world) on the east coast of the US is obviously something that most of us will not have a full grasp on for some time.

The US has not seen this level of destruction and loss of life inflicted on our own soil since our Civil War, and it’s made all the worse by the fact that it only took possibly a handful of people to carry it out, and maybe fewer still to plan and fund it. People will debate it’s historical significance until it becomes historically insignificant (probably by some cataclysm that removes most of humanity, or just whipes the US off the face of the planet).

I tend to be the kind of person that makes jokes to deal with adversity, even if I don’t find the jokes funny myself. I also tend to follow tangents wherever they may arise. The combination makes me, possibly, one of the worst people to write about this. Such a combination of rage and loss as I can never have possibly felt in my lifetime lives within me now, and I live on the other side of the country, with no relatives or close friends near the particular areas stricken. Of course, I’m sure there will be members of the TFC community, perhaps even people I felt close to, as close as I could be to someone in this community anyway, lost in this tragedy. But that will be something we can only find out with time, and is sometimes easier to handle because our relationships can be so far abstracted online.

Whatever the purpose of these attacks was, the only way in which they succeeded was in the destruction of property and human life that they brought. Where they may have sought terror and chaos, they were met only with an orderly response, and this calm, cool rage that must burn within every one of us now; along with the sorrow that must be felt by any rational person when this many lives are taken.

The only thing I ask, is that our response to this remain orderly, calm, and rational. Letting the rage inside us overtake rational thought leads down the same path as the terror and chaos they initially sought. Rage is only good when channelled into rational actions and controller by rational thoughts. To respond in any other way makes us no better than them.